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SCIENCE 



[N. S. Vol. XXXVIII. No. 973 



departments, and characteristically enough 

 he was the organizer of our congress clinical 

 and pathological museum. The pioneers of 

 abdominal surgery — Spencer Wells, Thomas 

 Keith, and Lawson Tait — ^were with us. 

 Huxley, the most brilliant expositor of 

 natural science of his time, discoursed to 

 us on the relations of medicine and biology. 

 William Bowman, whose work on the 

 minute anatomy of the eye was the founda- 

 tion of modern English ophthalmology, 

 was one of our most useful members. 



Last of all the Englishmen whom I will 

 mention was our great Lister, then in the 

 zenith of his grand career. He has but 

 lately been taken from us in the fullness of 

 years, and we commemorate him to-day in 

 the medal of our congress. 



Our foreign brethren were not less illus- 

 trious in the bede-roU of medical and sur- 

 gical achievement. Virchow, the Nestor of 

 morbid anatomy, honored and beloved by 

 us as by his countrymen, delivered a fine 

 historical discourse on the value of patho- 

 logical experiments. Volkmann gave a 

 critical survey of the recent advances of 

 surgery. Robert Koch gave what may truly 

 be called a path-breaking demonstration of 

 the microbial findings in several morbid 

 conditions, and he illustrated their charac- 

 teristic growth on different organic media. 

 Von Langenbeck and Esmarch spoke for 

 military surgery; Bonders and Snellen for 

 ophthalmology. Baccelli, Murri, and Pan- 

 taleoni represented Italian medicine. Prom 

 the United States came Austin Flint, the 

 accomplished physician and master of phy- 

 sical examination ; Billings, prince of medi- 

 cal bibliographers ; and Bigelow the famous 

 surgeon. 



The great French school was represented 

 by Brown-Sequard and Charcot, Lan- 

 cereaux and Bouchard and Verneuil and a 

 host of others; but there was one great 

 Frenchman with us who towered aloft 



amongst all his contemporaries, and who, 

 though not a medical man, exercised by his 

 discoveries a profound influence on the 

 medicine of the world, and that was Louis 

 Pasteur. In his address on vaccination in 

 relation to chicken cholera and splenic 

 fever, he gracefully linked his most recent 

 researches with the time-honored labors of 

 Edward Jenner on cow-pox. 



Time fails me to speak of other great and 

 honored names, but surely we may say 

 there were giants in those days. 



Now let us realize to ourselves that the 

 congress of 1881 marked not the parting of 

 the ways, but emphasized the notable fact 

 that the parting of the ways had already 

 been passed. The times of superstition, of 

 empiricism, and of transcendental specula- 

 tion had vanished. But what of the period 

 of accurate and detailed observation ? That 

 was neither superseded nor completed, but 

 it was already supplemented and redirected 

 into more fruitful channels by the new 

 development of experimental methods. 



If it had not been for the work of Pas- 

 teur, Lister and Koch, which was ex- 

 pounded to us thirty years ago, how pov- 

 erty-stricken would have been the output of 

 medicine and surgery in this our congress 

 of 1913! 



The great men — both observers and ex- 

 perimenters — of whom I have spoken were 

 like mountain peaks towering above the 

 plain of ordinary medical humanity, and 

 we sometimes sadly ask where are the 

 mountain peaks now? That is a shallow 

 and unenlightened question. For indeed, 

 thanks to the unremitting labors of workers 

 in multitudinous paths, we have attained a 

 glorious heritage — not of high mountain 

 peaks and deep valleys — but a lofty and 

 magnificent tableland of well-ordered and 

 correlated knowledge. 



Consider the bare fact that the fifteen 

 sections of the 1881 congress have, by the 



